My wife has a CPAP, and after several months of absolutely dreading sleep she decided that she hated it so badly she’d rather suffer the consequences than live with the machine.
I've used a CPAP for years, and I tolerated it pretty well. I was convinced it was dramatically improving the quality of my sleep - that I was waking up more well-rested and energetic.
However, I failed to notice any real improvement in my life. In time I became convinced it was basically just a placebo effect, and when I started developing some brain fog and waking up feeling light-headed I finally ditched the machine. And never felt the need for it again.
IMHO, some of this obsession with CPAPs is exactly this: a product of over-medicalisation, of companies that have found a new huge market to tap into (see Philips), and of placebo effect. In my case, learning to sleep on the side was enough.
I have a machine, took a few weeks to dial in the settings right for me. Tried a few different masks & machines from a sleep study clinic. In a few years I have gone less than 7 nights without using it.
Using the machine has been life changing for me.
I used to struggle to get up before 10am. Now I wake up naturally around 6:30am-7am most mornings.
Learning new things isn't a mountain to climb to retain just a bit of information. I feel like if I had done a sleep study 10 years earlier I would be a much better technologist than I am now.
I would recommend you suggest to your wife that she tries a few different mask styles.
I initially found I wasn't fitting the mask well or had a slightly wrong size and I would get some leaking that would keep me awake at night.
For what it is worth, which is probably not much, I don’t know that I actually believe she has sleep apnea at all. She does not snore, nor wake, nor generally have any trouble sleeping beyond initially getting to sleep - for which she is already on medication.
The only reason she even got checked in the first place was she paralyzed one of her diaphragms after a very bad bout of pneumonia, and her pulmonologist made a suggestion based on nothing other than an abundance of caution that we might want to make an appointment to see.
I remain largely unconvinced of the methodology by which she was diagnosed. It was an at-home single-night sleep study. She had to strap a box to her chest, place a handful of electrodes around and wear a breathing monitor. She only managed around three hours of sleep, largely because she could not sleep in her preferred position (stomach) and found the hoses in her nose anxiety inducing. It was, in my unprofessional opinion, completely unrepresentative of a normal restful night of sleep, and thus largely irrelevant data.
On top of that, the day we returned the device the doctor opened the appointment by checking what CPAP machines our insurance would cover - BEFORE the results came back from the lab.
I think you are the best person to judge your parnter's sleep health.
CPAP has been a gamechanger for me, and my partner. It took two years to get it through the health system, (having a box duct-taped to me at the hospital for home sleep analysis was completly useless), duriing which time I developed some chronic health issues. I was so grateful to to finally recieve my machine (the Nose Hose we call it) that the aquwardness and sillyness issues were tiny in comparison to the benifit of getting a good night's sleep.
It takes active effort to dial in the machine settings. If you just trust the APAP algorithm most people will never get used to it. Took me a year of tinkering. There's a great piece of software called OSCAR that helps.
My wife has a CPAP, and after several months of absolutely dreading sleep she decided that she hated it so badly she’d rather suffer the consequences than live with the machine.